How Sweet it is

“Now commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either.”

     The above excerpt from Chief Justice John Roberts’ speech to the 2017 graduating class of Cardigan Mountain School is no doubt one that kept those in attendance from falling asleep! To hope that the graduates will experience unfair treatment, betrayal, loneliness, bad luck, and the role of chance in general, is not the typical good luck and “go get ‘em” message they would expect to hear. But Roberts deftly makes the point that the likes of justice, loyalty, friendship, and the humbling awareness that the chanciness of both success and failure are of more value than going through life unscathed by difficulty and defeat.

     Of course we try our best to avoid painful circumstances and outcomes, but it seems that we can only learn life’s most valuable lessons by experiencing what might be called dark gifts, or blessings in disguise, those unwanted occurrences that can stop us in our tracks and bring us to our knees.

     The book from which the opening quote of this reflection is taken is titled The Sweet Spot, a phrase that, in baseball parlance, refers to a place on the bat where, when the ball is hit there, it feels sweet/smooth/mellow. When we “hit” life just right, when we meet its challenges head on, and when we are open to the growth we can experience through hard times, there can be a kind of sweetness even though it hurts to go on.

     Hitting a ball on the sweet spot of a bat is no guarantee that you will hit a homerun, any more than hitting life just right is assurance that everything will turn out for the best. But what is true is that when we do hit life just right we can experience the joy of the game, the satisfaction that comes with giving living our all.